"Teachers Beat Doctors" – Dave Ramsey Reveals the Careers Producing Most Millionaires

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Okay, I have to tell you, I was just looking on eBay, where I go for all kinds of things I love, and there it was.

**Tom** (0:06)
That hologram trading card.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:07)
One of the rarest, the last one I needed for my set.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:10)
Shiny like the designer handbag of my dreams. One of a kind. eBay had it, and now everyone's asking, ooh, where'd you get your windchill wiper?

**SPEAKER_4** (0:19)
eBay has all the parts that fit my car. No more annoying, just beautiful.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:25)
Millions of finds, each with a story.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:27)
eBay, things people love.

**Patrick Bet-David** (0:30)
Dave Ramsey and his organization did a survey surveying 10,167 wealthy Americans, the career that produced the most millionaires. The career that produced the most millionaires isn't what you think it is.
Dave Ramsey told a 22-year-old caller, Mark, something most new graduates never hear. We did the largest survey on millionaires ever done.
One of the things we researched was what occupation showed up the most amongst millionaires. Number one occupation among millionaires, engineer.
We did, Mark calling in June 15 after landing his first electric engineer job in Lincoln, Nebraska, making $89,000 a year, was asking about career advice. The verdict, the job title is a clue to behavior. Ramsey's claim is accurate, but easy to misread. Engineer was the most frequently occurring occupation in his national study of millionaires detailed in baby steps. Millionaires, the full top five in order were engineer, accountant, teacher, business and sales. Let me say that one more time. The full top five in order, engineer one, accountant two, teachers three, teachers, millionaires, teachers three, business, four, sales, five. And then you have attorneys that they wanted to put them in there in sixth place. Medical doctors did not even make it in the top five. Can you imagine you go become a medical doctor, you don't make it in the top five? The teacher entry is the giveaway. Teaching is not a high income field, yet it outranks medicine. That only makes sense once you accept the study's own conclusion. Roughly one-third of millionaires surveyed never earned a six-figure income in a single year consistent behavior that the heavy lifting, the mechanic underneath, is boring and powerful, a high savings rate compounded for a long time, marks $89,000 a year salary, sits well above the $37.53 an hour average for total private workers in May 2026, roughly double the $12.35 median weekly earnings for full-time workers in Q1 of 2026 The income gives them room, the behavior decides whether that room becomes wealth or evaporates into lifestyle. So, Tom, when you read some like this, and at the end he says, 25% of your take-home pay or less on rent alone pushed him lower, saying the least possible rent that you can get by is the best number, but 25% is your max. What do you think about the study here with the top five?

**Tom** (2:50)
Well, he's looking at people who are millionaires today, so it took time to get there, so you kind of have to look at where they started. With the house. Yeah.
Exactly. So a teacher, you could say, well, teachers have the summers off, maybe have a side hustle, maybe, or just maybe some of these people, I think, are prudent living, and the other people on here, I think, was an engineer and accountant and sales. I think those were just good professions that allowed you to scale your income. But I think there's two things going on in the survey. I don't have any quarrel with the survey, but I think if you really pulled out the cross tabs, as we say during election year, what you would find is some people that were very prudent in how they lived and grew up at a time where that house equity, I bet you, is a part of this. And then other people were in the professions that they were leveraged over time.

**Patrick Bet-David** (3:43)
Yeah, I agree with that. And by the way, is this the clip by Dave? If you want to play the clip, let's watch this clip together. Go for it.

**Dave Ramsey** (3:49)
Real millionaires, ten freaking thousand of them, who they are, where they come from. And one of the many conclusions we drew from this was the top ten career fields that we found, according to frequency, within the study. So what career field did we find most often, second most often, and so on? The most often we found was engineer. The second was an accountant or CBA.

**Patrick Bet-David** (4:15)
I want to know what the top ten is, because I registered the five.